The ATF is among the federal law enforcement agencies that has run amuck
I saw a tee-shirt for sale on Facebook last week that made me laugh. It was from a libertarian group and it said, “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be offerings at a convenience store, not a government agency.” I couldn’t agree more. I have never understood why we even have an ATF when the FBI investigates the same federal crimes within the same Department of Justice.
I have several other problems with the ATF that are more serious than jurisdiction. On a personal level, I hate that the ATF either will not or cannot allow a person with a non-violent felony conviction to own a gun. After blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, I was convicted in 2012 of violating the obscure Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982—I was only the second American ever charged under this law—and I lost my gun rights for life.
That may change soon. On March 19, Attorney General Pam Bondi set aside ATF’s decades-long ban on gun ownership for non-violent felons. And just a few days earlier, President Donald Trump fired the U.S. Pardon Attorney after she refused to allow actor Mel Gibson to buy a gun years after his misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is also to blame for non-violent felons losing their gun rights. It was Schumer who, in 1992, pushed a law through Congress that forbade ATF from using taxpayer money to investigate former felons who had applied for reinstatement of their gun rights. Think of how absurd this is: The law says that a former felon can apply to the ATF to reinstate his gun rights, but the ATF is forbidden from spending taxpayer money to do the investigation necessary for the reinstatement. So literally not a single person has had his gun rights reinstated in the past 33 years.
Technically, it is not ATF’s fault that it has not reinstated anybody’s gun rights. But this next story most certainly is ATF’s fault, and it is a clear example of one of the things that is grotesquely wrong with ATF.
Bryan Malinowski was the executive director of the Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton National Airport. He began that job in 2019 after holding similar airport leadership positions in Fort Lauderdale and El Paso. Things were going well for him and his family in 2024. He was making a solid $250,000 a year, he was an official in the American Association of Airport Executives, and he was certified as a flight instructor with (advanced) instrument and multi-engine ratings. He and his wife had been married for 25 years.
Malinowski was also an avid coin collector since childhood, and he enjoyed going to coin shows around the region. Coin shows, however, often share space with gun shows and, over the course of a few years, Malinowski began collecting firearms. By his wife’s account, he had bought fewer than 12 of them. But ATF somehow got it into their heads that he had bought and sold 142 guns, so many that he was “engaged in the business of selling firearms.” And, if that were the case, Malinowski would have had to purchase an annual Federal Firearms License for $65.
What would you or I do if we were ATF agents in such a case? We would probably pick up the phone, call Malinowski, and ask him if he was selling guns. If the answer was yes, we would advise him to fill out the form and pay the $65. But that is most certainly not what the ATF did. Instead, the ATF inserted a GPS tracker underneath Malinowski’s car and asked a federal judge for a no-knock warrant.
On March 19, 2024, ATF agents and Little Rock police officers arrived at Malinowski’s home before dawn. They cut power to the house, put tape over the Ring camera, and broke the door down. In less than 60 seconds, Bryan Malinowski was dead. An ATF agent had shot him in the head seconds after breaking down the door. Malinowski’s wife was detained in her nightgown and forced to stand in the 34-degree weather for more than four hours, while sobbing and asking repeatedly why they had killed her husband.
In the end, ATF agents did not find any cache of guns. They only found the fewer than a dozen that Malinowski was widely known to have purchased legally. The ATF, apparently with a bureaucratically straight face, investigated itself in the Malinowski killing. The Bureau found that its agents had acted legally and properly and no disciplinary action was taken against any of the agents involved in the killing.
An investigation by NBC News in 2023 found that between 2018 and 2022, 223 people were shot and 151 were killed by agents of the ATF, FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals. How many of these killings were found to be unjustified? Two. It goes to show you that the Malinowski murder—and that’s what it is: murder—is not terribly uncommon.
The political philosopher James Mill wrote in 1835, “Who are to watch the watchmen? The people themselves.” It is high time we started demanding justice.
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About the Author
John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004.
In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture.
Kiriakou was a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former counter-terrorism consultant. While employed with the CIA, he was involved in critical counter-terrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor did he ever authorize or engage in such crimes.
After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou appeared on ABC News in an interview with Brian Ross, during which he became the first former CIA officer to confirm the existence of the CIA’s torture program. Kiriakou’s interview revealed that this practice was not just the result of a few rogue agents, but was official U.S. policy approved at the highest levels of the government.
Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.
John can be reached at: jkiriakou@mac.com.
